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Where would black Americans be if their ancestors had never been enslaved? Assume that all black Americans in the country today were the descendants of people who willingly immigrated to the United States under various conditions (some came b/c of war back home, others wanted a new experiences, etc.).
We obviously cannot answer this question definitively, but I would like people's thoughts on the matter regardless. Responding with "we can never really know", "there's just too many factors to come up with an answer" or similarly defeatist answers is not welcomed in this thread. This is a thought experiment, not a dissertation defense.
So, again, given the narratives you use to explain racial inequality, your perceptions of black Americans and other factors, where do you think that the black population in the United States would be if their ancestors had never been enslaved?* Would they have the same employment, education, crime and other rates as White Americans? Would they be in the same position they are in now?
*Note : I realize that not every black American in the United States is a descendant of slaves. This question addresses the ones that are. I hope that takes care of all the red herrings.
Where would they be? It's hard to say.
Entering as willing immigrants would likely give them at least some leg up as compared to entering as slaves. However, as Fiddy noted, it's unlikely that the society they met on arrival would've been much more tolerant of them than it was historically.
Frankly, that's the whole problem with your scenario from the get go. Such a thing simply never could have happened in real life.
American culture had a hard enough time simply tolerating, let alone integrating, Catholics from slightly different European backgrounds than those of the original Protestant English and German colonists. There is absolutely no way in Hell that a bunch of non-Christian African tribals would have been able to make any headway. Hell! Logistically speaking, they never would've even been able to make it here in the first place.
For that reason, without slavery, the "black community" you seem to be envisioning here almost certainly wouldn't even exist, which renders the entire OP a moot point.
Honestly, a more interesting question here is whether or not the concept of all-inclusive "melting pot whiteness" which is so intrinsic to modern Americans of European descent ever would have developed in the first place without a substantial African population for it to stand in opposition to. It's entirely possible that non-WASP groups like the Irish, Italians, and Jews might've borne the brunt of social scorn in the black community's absence, and never lost the societal stigma of "outsiderhood" which had carried over from European culture without the influence of African Americans on the American cultural experience.
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